Cool op amp

TCA0372 is cool too: dual 1 amp, 45 cents, but not RRIO.

Would make a cute little headphone driver, I think.

"This application note is one of effectual measures for understanding the dissipation power, thermal shutdown and behavior of current limit, to avoiding unexpected trebles."

Yeah, I guess that if you overdrive it into a sudden shutdown, it could clip and start producing nasty harmonics, including unexpected trebles! :-)

Looks like it would make a better headphone-driver IC than many headphone-driver ICs!

I was thinking about using it to drive long runs of XLR cable in the good ol' "wrap local feedback around it with a capacitor and then isolate the global feedback network coming from the line capacitance node with a small amount of series resistance" topology.

Clipping and nasty harmonics? Sounds like a overheated op-amp might be a good sound source for an analog synth.

I enjoyed that old Star Trek episode "The Trouble With Trebles". ;)

...the tribble with trebles?

The input noise is 20 to 40dB higher than is normally acceptable.

See the graph on p9 of the pdf.

Even as a headphone amp, this could easily be a deal breaker.

.... Phil

Right, I had originally thought it was a dual. $3 for mediocre noise performance as a headphone amp is nothing special.

What it likely excels at is putting large currents into solenoids/servos/long runs of cable. In that role it seems to be about

CMOS opamps have a lot of positive attributes and not all are that noisy. I use a pile (>1M/yr) of these, mainly because they're cheaper than anything from ADI or TI. Rail-to-rail I/O matters in this application.

There are lower noise opamps but, of course, there are other trade-offs, as well.

$0.40 @ 5K isn't bad

Quite nice indeed. I like the TO-252 package.

Too bad the Vos drift is so horrible (perhaps as bad as an order of magnitude worse than an LM324)- that's accentuated in a power device and it's going to add distortion.

I have an application where this could be used inside a slow-ish feedback loop, so the drift isn't so important.

-sp